Todd Herman on Becoming Your Alter Ego

somebody at home right now is listening they want to have the change that want to have the breakthrough yeah what the [ __ ] do they do is so okay well that's that's different front like if we're talking about identity I'm talking about oh that's the process of if I'm onboarding someone into my bits like into my I love that yeah so I think that we'll get into the nitty-gritty of yeah like what you're trying to tease out so they're doing the diagnostic it's telling you yeah it's telling me where they need training like where

they haven't spent much time on mastering the mental and the emotional part of their game okay right cuz we're trying to is this reminiscent of a personality test nah well there's there's there's elements of that but you know I use a whole bunch of different Diagnostics because I am NOT a believer like there's so many people who are out there or like I'm an INF GA or infj or whatever it is from myers-briggs and I'm like boy again what a fantastic way to trap your and limit yourself because people love to say you know that's

why personality tests and all these quizzes online are so popular they go viral because they go i'ma this people love to discover more about themselves but what it actually does is it traps many people because they're like I'm an introvert and introverts don't blah blah blah whatever they say it's like okay great now you're gonna live through that when you hear that you hear alright this person has a label now yeah label has created limitations well they're no longer recognizing that they're actually a multitude of and what's interesting is I don't know what word you

would use their personalities traits multiple events no multiple of identities so identity okay so now real fast define identity what does it encompass an identity encompasses I talked about in chapter 3 of the book the different layers that gets tacked on so you know at this core of what we are is just like pure possibility like we can we can move in many directions with our with the kind of inborn talents of what it means to be a human being okay so there's a core possibility outside of that creates what I call this kind of

core drivers layer core drivers are things that you've that are that you've attached yourself to and that are attached to you because of your your race your religion your values where you're from because people don't realize just how much that stuff shapes them you know well I'm black so that means that this or I'm white and that means there's a I'm Asian or I'm a Catholic Ramat you or have you have you heard that study where if you take an Asian woman who's about to take a math test and stereotypically women are worse at math

and stereotypically Asians are better at math yeah and if you prime her by saying oh you're a woman I wonder how well you're gonna do on the test they'll do worse but if you take that same person and prime them oh you're Asian I wonder how will you doing the test yeah then they'll do better yeah that is so crazy to me yeah and when I was diving into some of your research that was what I was thinking is like that there's some of the you're taking control of the priming essentially yes so all right

so keep going understand so core drivers sit there and again even being a part of a larger group or like military man police officer you know this so we we have these labels and now because we they're they're the things that really can help either block someone's possibility or you know unleash it in many ways we see that the Olympics where someone who's coming out of nowhere but now because they're wearing the know the red white and blue on their back or the red and white from Canada or the wherever from somewhere else they just

level up because of what it means to now represent their country other people conversely I can't use it with them because I've worked with you know well over 100 Olympians that actually crushes their performance like it's just too much way it's too much or they actually don't care some people don't care like it's that's not meaningful to them that they're an American or a Canadian or a Brit or a Tozzi whatever the cases so so that's the core drivers and then outside of that I call it the belief layer so that's where your attitudes your

perceptions your beliefs about you or the world around you sit okay this is all shaping that identity and it's shaping it in the different areas of our life and the roles that we play that of an entrepreneur that of a parent father husband wife you know lover brother sister mom like all those that we have and that's why it's important that we sort of peel away the layer or peel away and show that no you many identities and we can shape you know you get to shape yourself because that you're doing it anyway I'm not

I'm not explaining anything to anyone that is not grounded in gravity like it's real its truth we have many identities we just don't think about it but I'm trying to build awareness so that people can see it and they go oh because once you build the awareness all bets are off with people because now do you have like archetypes of alter egos that you push people towards depending on what they're trying to accomplish I love archetype stuff but that's probably where it's a little bit intuitive but not necessarily you know the the natural lean when

you talk about this is people talk about you know like bringing that kind of like lion to things or that roar or whatever but I have one client she's in the book where I talk about you know that never resonates she's this real soft-spoken like super kind person and her trying to bring out like an inner lion thing wasn't wouldn't work but for her she's German she has a she has a deep history in her family of like exploration being in the outdoors and she had this really great reverence for a buck like a male

deer and for her it was like the way that it stands its ground despite the fact that a bear is coming off that's what people don't people don't see the fights between a wild buck and a bear or a cougar where it fights it off with its antlers mmm you don't see that they always see the kill but sometimes the prey wins and and a big male buck will will do that and fight with its antlers fight as well but for her what she needed because she was a business owner and she again very common

thing where she ran a sort of a freelance marketing company and you know scope creep you know it's like so now she's but she's building a website for someone I go you know what we need some brochures done too you know can you add that on yeah I'll do that too and because she's so nice and kind all this and now she's completely unprofitable or she's just making you know a laughable amount an hour so the way that she started showing up in her business was through this lens of a buck that stands its ground

and honors the fact that she's valuable like she is what she has is valuable and people need to respect that lion wasn't gonna do that so no archetypes I don't push people towards certain ones and at the end of the day the most common sort of alter ego identity that people adopt is actually grandmas if there was a category Amma's and grandmas because in order for you to either elite performers not renounce your cops and these are these are people that are either in in the business world grandmas aren't popular necessarily in the sports world

that's not where so I'm coming with grandma so it and again you're not becoming the grandma you're adopting the traits the qualities or the abilities that you admire about your grandmother okay I've got a really wealthy man in in New York who's a client for a long time and he was kind of a traditional Wall Street type that just railroaded himself towards success burned out and churned out a lot of leaders in his business but now he had a very large private equity business and his leadership team was burning out quite a bit and so

when I started working with him his identity needed to change because he was now in a completely different role that what got him to be successful right so that hard-charging thing that really helped him but that's not working now that's gonna break his business so he needed to step into a new identity couldn't figure out a way to do that so when I was talking about like well who do you respect like who do you admire as great leaders of business or just leaders in general and he was talking about like Jack wells or Sumner

Redstone and and these names were coming out and so I kind about it just talking to him I could get that he wasn't like emotionally connected to that idea hmm so then I just asked him what his family cuz I knew a bit about it I mean I knew his history and he started talking to me about his his grandmother her husband died in the Holocaust she had four young boys brought them over to America classic story of you know settling in the Lower East Side with nothing seventy dollars in her pocket raising these four

amazing young men all going on to have to success my client was the son of of one of them and you know just talked with great reverence about just how like amazingly nurturing she was but really strong with an iron rod up her back with like the values of how we operate as a family and and I said that's that's who your identity is so how did people then grab that and actually put it to use because you were talking earlier about you know you need a uniform and do you have the uniform of the

dad you walk in so I'm thinking what's the uniform of the grandmother but I'm guessing you're gonna say it's not quite how it works yet so there's again there's there's different ways to activate this so I went on you know continuing on with that it's like actively like getting him to realize well what are those qualities that you just appreciate about your grandma like what is it about it because the reason well what are those qualities one of those attributes and where those traits and then so yeah a uniform really helps something we call them

totems and artifacts something that physical that you can put on that can help you step into that because again we're acting with this intention now is you're choosing it and and that item represents what you're activating so for him there was no thing there was no something there isn't something that he was gonna go put on but there was another quality that we use is something that you use in your environment so he had a framed photo of his grandmother and he wasn't going to be like you know acting through this identity throw his entire

date but it was when he needed to have conversations with his leadership team that he needed to like you know pump the brake on his extraordinarily aggressive personality and and start you know acting with a completely different intention so anytime he was about to have a leadership conversation he had this frame of his grandma sitting on his on his credenza on his desk story and it was we we like to create triggers so there was a switch so he would turn that frame so now she was facing him what's the importance of the triggers that's

really interesting to me the importance of it is to create rituals and why why does that matter because human beings are are grounded in rituals and there is an it's almost like an honoring ceremony because what I want you to do is I want you to I don't want you to dishonor the memory or the spirit of whatever or whoever it is that you are activating by not truly acting through the qualities of that individual so the conversation with him is is like now you know choose your grandmother very carefully because you you cannot go

into a conversation with your leadership team and act the way that you do and dishonor the way that your grandmother would handle that by you acting in this completely you know kind of wild and you know swear Laden way because she wouldn't do that so that trigger again it's just it helps to send a signal through your entire electrical system that something different is happening so interesting are you familiar with Tony Robbins and this whole idea of state change Cheryl VESA sure and that's really interesting to me and there's something so fascinating about the human

ability to change your state like reading your stuff about alter egos and I was like okay this is interesting there's something about for anybody that that doesn't quite have their hooks into this yet do the following exercise sit down close your eyes and think smile yeah and what's weird is you will feel the change like you'll feel a neurochemical change just by thinking smile yeah like you're not actually moving the muscles you're just thinking about the smile yeah my gut instinct is if you sat there long enough thinking smile you'd actually start to smile and

then to take this to where you started that ritualistic move there's something about birthing it through physicality yes that and actually be really curious to understand the research or yeah you know the the underlying physiological thing so I have this obsession with physiological hooks so there there is something about your mindset to physicality sure that is incredibly important like when you see people trying to do a state change athletes will do this all the [ __ ] time yeah and I've done this I do this sometimes if I don't want to get in a cold

shower and I'm like [ __ ] yeah I don't want to do this yeah and I have to like state change it I'll [ __ ] pound my chest there's I don't know what it is but dude you do that and boom it's like I've got the aggression I have exactly what I need to tackle this and to just completely I always think of it in terms of frame of reference but my gut instinct is if I were to define frame of reference and you were to define alter ego we would find that they're similar

they may exactly overlap but it's a no a very similar I mean I've seen a lot of stuff you mean you talked a lot about identity with people right like you're you're you you're dancing around the stuff that I've been working with people on for you know 22 years really alter ego stuff is what came into my practice in 2003-2004 because I just started to discover that this was the golden thread that was weaving together all of these elite people that I was now starting to work with where they were talking about I've got this

persona that I stepped into I've got this other kind of identity I have this character that I use and you know I played college football at a high level I was a nationally ranked Bama player I played sport at a high level not pro but I was a good athlete and my responses back to those people was always like oh that's really cool because I use I use that as well it was more like an interesting kind of connection point and then it was me preparing a US swimmer a lady for the Athens Games back

in 2004 where's just the way that she said it worse all of a sudden all of these dominoes of past conversations came together and I was like wait a second there is this consistency amongst the people were consistently performing at their best they keep on referencing this idea there's something there do you know who's Sasha Fierce is of course I know Sasha Fierce is yeah absolutely to me is when I heard so for anybody listening that doesn't know who Sasha Fierce is that's Beyonce is the alter ego on stage and I thought wow that's so

interesting that somebody that successful uses this technique to have the bawls essentially to go out on stage to own it to be fierce and she needed it you know when you take a look at her story she's a gospel singing young black girl from Houston Texas who people would show up every Sunday they can't wait to hear beyonce saying gospel songs her dad recognizing her talent and her love for music gets her and Solange inside of a dance group there's eight of them and now Beyonce who's used to dressing very modestly in a church environment

singing gospel hymns and songs is now asked to sing provocative music dancing provocatively she had a real internal-combustion over this right now I want people to track this are there some things that you've got some internal-combustion over right now that you're resisting against because you have a tough time seeing yourself do it despite the fact that you want to manifest it you want to pursue that entrepreneurial career you want to pursue that acting or that singing or you want to get out there okay so she then created Sasha Fierce someone else another identity to go

out there that loved going out there performing loved the provocative loved dancing that way and that's who she would step into and activate when she went out there now all of a sudden she could protect for herself that sort of more innocent Beyonce you